I’ve been a supporter of the union movement all my political life. Unite’s decision to suspend the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner – while threatening to review its membership with the Labour Party – is shocking. But it won’t be surprising to many charities who’ve engaged with Unite.
As chair of an anti-poverty charity, I was proud to vote to voluntarily recognise Unite last year. But our experience over the past six months has left me disappointed – and questioning how unions and small charities can better work together.
Resources spent on dispute
At Z2K, we support people facing poverty and injustice in the UK’s broken social security and housing systems. Unions and social justice charities like ours should be natural allies. We share fundamental values: fairness, dignity at work, the belief that people deserve better, and that change happens when we organise together.
But since recognising Unite, the union's engagement with us has felt adversarial, extractive, and damaging – with many of our staff feeling caught in the crossfire. I’ve been concerned that Unite’s approach has felt focused on using staff to shore up the union’s position nationally – rather than actually standing alongside staff to support their interests.
When we proposed a modest 5% increase in director pay earlier this year to correct a historic pay discrepancy, we set out a fair and open process. We undertook a transparent benchmarking exercise, developed an evidence-based proposal, and shared it with Unite – despite director pay falling outside the scope of our recognition agreement.
The union chose to dispute our proposals – and dramatically escalated the situation, calling two weeks of strike action – despite a willingness from leadership to continue negotiations. What’s more, Unite repeatedly made inaccurate claims in its public communications, including the claim we had decided to give directors a 25% pay rise – a figure that simply isn’t true.
These inaccurate claims distorted the public narrative in ways that undermined trust and derailed negotiations. Meanwhile, the sustained nature of the dispute forced a redirection of time, energy and resources, adding to wider financial pressures and eventually helping to undermine the sustainability of our proposals.
New model needed
Stretched by limited funding and rising demand, many charities like ours are finding themselves in similar positions – not just with Unite, but with engagement with unions more widely. Navigating huge responsibilities and fragile infrastructure, and without the resources of large corporates or public sector giants, the current model of industrial relations creates a risk that the very communities we exist to support are the ones who lose out.
If organisations that share values of fairness, dignity, and collective action are struggling to work together – whether they’re small charities like Z2K, or a political party like Labour grounded in the union movement – something isn’t working.
We need a reset. That doesn’t mean giving up on unions. It means finding a better way to work together. A model that reflects the shared mission of all those fighting for social justice. One that’s rooted in trust, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to lifting up communities collectively rather than pitting them against one another.
This means unions like Unite must also move beyond a definition of social justice which is focused too narrowly on advancing the interests of one single group, rather than our society as a whole. Failure to do this will inevitably mean increasing competition and tension between the interests of the communities that charities like ours serve, and the importance of advancing workers’ rights – undermining the principles of solidarity the trade union movement is built on.
In an increasingly polarised world, it’s more important than ever for those committed to equality and justice to work together – not against each other.
